"Submergence" by J.M. Ledgard (published 2011) - SECOND review.

My first review can be located here: https://feliciareviewsbooks.blogspot.com/2018/07/submergence-by-jm-ledgard-published-2011.html

Here's my second.

An undergraduate professor of mine instructed me once on the act of reading. If you like the book, she said, and have only read it once, you have not *read* the book. If you liked it the first time, she continued, then read it a second. Then, read it again for a third and perhaps final time. Only after that can you truly decide if you liked it. 

I've read Submergence for the second time and have confirmed that I do like it. Very much so. While I understand this technique isn't possible for all books, it already says something if you decide to read a book for a second time, knowing there is still more to see, to understand. (Also, my prof. was speaking as a philosopher, and you know how they are :) My point - which was/is my professors - will demonstrate itself if you glance through my first review and then read this one. 

Water. J.M. Ledgard's Submergence is fundamentally about the importance of that element, and how little, we in the first world, we the rich, we overflowing with abundance and full bellies, seem to think about it. It is an element that comprises our bodies, an element that we search for daily and in the middle of the night, the element that makes up most of our planet, the element which science says we have evolved from. Yet we consider it so sparingly. Because it has always been there for us, not yet commodified ubiquitously as it has already been in the third world. Water. 

"The anthropocene: a geological age marked by plastic."

...

"And if sea mammals could become so disoriented to beach themselves, so could man exterminate himself."

Ledgard juxtaposes two stories: that of a British Secret Service agent/water engineer and that of a biomathematician - both part of the upper class - who encounter this element in two varying ways. The former for the lack of it while spying on jihadists in Somalia who then hold him captive, serving him maggots for breakfast. The latter on a mission to the "largest uncharted hydrothermal vent field in the world, far below the plunging icebergs and the blue-black top in a part of the Hadal deep whose unlit clock ticked at an incalculably slower speed" - she, Danny Flinders, is literally submerged by something - water - that might kill her if one little thing goes awry. 

Interspersed within this story is a romance between two humans dedicated to their profession, albeit differently. When they fall in love serendipitously while staying at a quaint luxury hotel on the beaches of France, their conversations become a dialogue on the existential crises of our times as well as conversations on the ethical obligations we have to one another. Think of Plato and Socrates, and in a way that we can't grasp because we are so far removed from those Ancient Greeks. The Socratic Method, but organic and sexy, biological and urgent, made all the more real by a restraint that can only be considered stoic and sad, its release sparingly joyous. Tell me something horrible, she asks. Why? he responds. Because we don't have much time she says. And so he does.

What is unique and brilliant about Ledgard's writing is that in each separate part of the book he infuses mythology and folklore either by weaving it into a conversation between characters or else talking as the narrator who is reflecting on the conditions that he is describing from "above". Ledgard, because of the subject matter he is undertaking within this novel, speaks of Ancient Sumer and their laws, Arabia and the djinnis, the Middle Ages and the Crusades, the Garden of Eden and the fall... still more. He is loud about his opinions on the War in Afghanistan and the spread of Jihad throughout the Eastern World. When we face the concept of race in Submergence it is raw - a humanity split down the middle. Ledgard wonders how to rectify this mess... in one sentence the main character - James More in this instance - thinks of the mockery the English land makes of all Bedouin absolutes existing today. 

There are gems within the pages of Submergence which you will not see if you do not take in the story slowly. Like the world we live in today, which rushes by at an alarming rate, there must be an intentional, conscious effort to slow the hell down and comprehend the picture in front of us before just seeing all the shit (pardon my language). There is, indeed, plenty of that - shit - in this book, which leads to this question: why write down all of the horror related to the Islamic fundamentalists in the Middle East? Aren't we supposed to be breaking down this ideology of the "other" that currently weighs so heavy on our friends, those believers in Allah? A good, healthy dollop of culture shock, if taken in willingly, might, just might, start to reflect off the teensiest bit of understanding. Culture shock is a real thing, lest we forget. Ledgard refers to ancient tribal rituals - describes them as they are performed today. His other commentary: it might do us well to let *hate* sink in, if only to get to the bottom of it. That's James Mores' story. It might do us well to let *fear* sink in, if only to get to the bottom of that. That's Dannys'. Think of both to get to the heart of the *problem*. Reading Submergence may not be such a bad place to begin:

"There is another world in our world, but we have to live in this one."